ELDIARY: A Digital Diary Mobile Application Integrated With Emotion Recognition for Elderly

Designing mobile application technology with elderly people poses its own challenges. It is known that the complexity to understand the emotion of an elder were bringing anxiety towards younger family members and caregivers. In this era of technology, it is possible to identify how a human emotion works through the emotion recognition technology. However, there is still lacks applications which use that technology. The application project found that the appropriate medium to use the emotion recognition technology is diary for elderly users. Therefore, introducing Eldiary – a mobile application that were proposed to integrate the emotion recognition technology practicalities and the use of digital diary to encourage better understanding between them. Elderly people can write their own special memories inside the private diary while the caregivers can see the emotion expressed in the diaries without able to read specifically what did they write. The emotion recognition will be made possible through the application of linguistic analysis capability from Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing that able to determine tone of the text written in the application. The application project methodology chosen were Rapid Application Development (RAD). RAD ensure that every phase of the development can be done quickly and efficient. All the requirements were successfully gathered from various survey techniques including interview and questionnaire. The requirements gathered were carefully analyzed to bring suitable user experience and functionality on the real-world basis. Then, the project was developed with the use of numerous software to implement all the requirements and design. This prototype of application project contributes to understanding of emotion recognition for Software Engineering body of knowledge. It aims to produce a guideline for future designers and developers of elderly based applications.